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Cooking Like It MattersSat, 28 Feb 2015 19:00:30 GMTSeamus Mullen and the Best Paragraph About Food Ever Written
I’m always amazed at the number of diets that forbid you from even touching a list of foods you may love, foods that might bring you joy—joy that might, in itself, increase your life expectancy as it increases your quality of life. Who knows?

You’ll notice that the book isn’t so much about cutting out as it is adding in. Most of the diets I read about were elimination diets, which I find very exclusive. I wanted this book to be much more inclusive. Simply from a philosophical position, there is something inherently more positive about embracing rather than rejecting. This is not to say you include just any old thing. This book is about what works for me. It is not a prescription for dealing with inflammation (though I have managed to get off of some very hardcore drugs and be nearly pain-free through food and exercise!) If you find that gluten or corn or nightshades don’t work for you, by all means, avoid them. I happen to LOVE tomatoes. And corn. And eggplant. Initially I thought I was completely screwed. Then I changed the way I thought about these ingredients and I realized what I really loved about a tomato in August, the height of its season, was completely missing from a tomato I had any other time of year. I derive a lot of pleasure and joy from eating a tomato in peak season and I get nearly no joy or pleasure from eating an unripe, out of season tomato. The solution seemed pretty obvious to me: eat them in moderation, when they are best and make something of a ceremony out of it. Really celebrating that ingredient and the pleasure and joy I it gives me far outweighs the inflammatory impact it may or may not have on me. Frankly, I think a lot of the diet-related issues people suffer from have more to do with extended over-exposure to the wrong ingredients rather than the ingredients themselves. Of course I have no scientific proof to back this up, but that’s what my gut (pardon the pun) tells me. ~ Food Hero, Seamus Mullen

You should use the link and read the rest. It’s brilliant.

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http://lacucinapovera.com/articles/82/seamus-mullen-and-the-best-paragraph-about-food-ever-written
Fri, 11 May 2012 15:22:34 GMTJames Martintag:lacucinapovera.com,2012-05-11:d1a1b5baaf05b849cab05ba161f3c84c/4354c5b1861b47d230308b3fc14af67bA Little Fear With Your Food?
One thing about being an old fart in a world of young farts is that you begin to see patterns emerge that other folks don’t seem to see. For example, the trend that has been promoted by our government for years has been so successful in making us complacent to their idiotic strategy to pump money into already rich people that it has now been incorporated into corporate strategy for selling more products. That trend is fear mongering. You don’t hear much about it, do you?

It’s easy. You latch on to some small medical study on nutrition, blow it out of proportion, and then come out with a product that alleges not to contain that product (but sometimes really does). Or, you take a product like “Italian Salad Dressing” that shouldn’t ever contain sugar and you make a sugarless version. You know, for the people who should avoid sugar.

Michael Ruhlman has recently written on the hoax that is perpetrated by Trader Joe’s with its “No Nitrites Added” bacon.

Bacon is one of the greatest foods on the planet, but the food marketers are going to figure out a way to make you buy their bacon. So what they do is use celery powder and celery juice (note the asterix on the label above) as their nitrate source (celery is loaded with nitrate) and are therefore are allowed to say no nitrites added. Why go to the trouble? Because we don’t know any better. Can we really be this stupid? I have only one word to say on this beyond an emphatic yes. ~ The “No Nitrites Added” Hoax

Isn’t it time that we admitted that there was nothing to fear but fear itself? After all, airline travel is a pain because we continually fear the illusive and unlikely shoe bomber while completely ignoring the possibility of a bra bomber. How nuts is that?

Buy good food from folks who care about quality and don’t employ “marketers.” What could be simpler than that?

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http://lacucinapovera.com/articles/81/a-little-fear-with-your-food
Tue, 10 May 2011 14:32:53 GMTJames Martintag:lacucinapovera.com,2011-05-10:d1a1b5baaf05b849cab05ba161f3c84c/04babe0dac3abe0303e9de826c3b48deGMO Labeling and the Monsanto-Owned Senator
I am lucky to live in Europe half the year, where GMO foods have quietly disappeared from a lack of interest in them. Europe, you see, requires GMO foods be labeled honestly. The Free Market works, when (and only when) the consumer knows exactly what he’s buying. The free market has rejected Monsanto. Good for them.

It’s not that way in Vermont, unfortunately. A GMO labeling law ended in the Finance Committee when Democratic Sen. Peter Shumlin voted with Republicans to table the bill.

“Shumlin told Sen. Cheryl Rivers (D), then chair of the Agriculture Committee, that he was “unwilling to support a bill requiring labeling of genetically modified foods because the Democrats had already lost the contributions of pharmaceutical companies, and he was not willing to sacrifice contributions from the food industry,” according to the Rutland Herald.

So, if we’re going to be that honest about being bought and paid for by huge corporations, doncha think we’d wake up and vote these money-hungry bastards out of office?

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http://lacucinapovera.com/articles/80/gmo-labeling-and-the-monsanto-owned-senator
Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:33:40 GMTJames Martintag:lacucinapovera.com,2011-03-30:d1a1b5baaf05b849cab05ba161f3c84c/bd8784694d66ade5f33dfff04371a4b1Love What You Do
Seldom do I come upon a blog that I feel compelled to read the whole thing. Well, the first page at least. That honor recently went to the food blog called Love What You Do :A Website for People Interested in Culinary Careers. Marcella Hazan alerted me to it because the current post is about her. One thing you can say, good food seems to have kept the 87 year old queen of Italian cuisine lively and well.

Marcella is even embarking on a new book and they are planning to visit New York in June.

So there. Eat Italian. Eat Well. Write books when you’re pushing 90.

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http://lacucinapovera.com/quick-reads/79/love-what-you-do
Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:10:44 GMTJames Martintag:lacucinapovera.com,2011-03-28:d1a1b5baaf05b849cab05ba161f3c84c/5079e466cafc7fe7474185b8e7c87905Google's Corporate Ready Recipe Search
Amanda Hesser has laid into Google’s New Corporate-Ready Recipe Search, a deviation that seems to have extruded the offerings of dedicated food bloggers into the murky and fetid depths of its engine.

My feeling is that until folks wake up to the fact that only Corporations and Spammers have the balls to code recipes like 1 minute, or 77 calorie, cassoulet (the latter including a lamb leg AND a sausage per serving), Google will favor said lies unless we refuse to use it to find such garbage. Yes, it’s a constant battle with corporate crap food producers on all fronts, and Google is not likely to side with the folks lacking the deep pockets and willing programmers. Google, too, is a large, publicly traded corporation looking to feed those at the top of their own chain.

Remember when corporations were to operate in the public interest? Stuff happened that shouldn’t have happened, which brought on:

Then, the Supreme Court decision had the truly ironic effect of turning all human citizens, white as well as black, into second class citizens. Corporations enjoy all the Constitutional protections of human beings, plus exemptions from responsibility that humans don’t enjoy. Plus, of course, they can live forever, which humans can’t do either. ~ Corporations and the Public Interest

Sad. Long live the…oh, wait…ok, long live the 4 day cassoulet. It’s not like you have to stay up and watch a cassoulet like it’s a sick dog who’s vomiting on everything; we need to teach people of the relativity of recipe time, doncha think? Good food might take time and have calories. So what? Doesn’t happiness count any more?